Cheer or Kill. A Novel. By Eleanor hitch. (Charing Cross
Publishing Company.)—We presume that this is what is sometimes described as a novel of absorbing interest. The heroine, if we may so call her, plans and by the hand of another carries out successfully a most heartless and detestable murder ; this occurs in the first forty
pages, when she is at the mature age of sixteen. The novelist after this seems to think that this young lady may, after all, have been an amiable victim of circumstances, endows her with a few not altogether unlovely qualities, and marries her to almost tho only thoroughly pleasant person in the book. True, she was in love with another man, jealousy of whom had prompted her early crime, and who not un- naturally endeavours to keep her at arm's length ever afterwards. How Juliet foils his intention, makes her way to his prison cell in disguise, follows him to Cayenne, also in disguise, and nurses him there, forces him to elope with her, still unknown to him, and finally, nearly ruins every prospect he has of happiness in life, by turning up on the eve of his marriage with another, drugs her, and at last sets herself on fire, in the sheer desperation of her unholy love,—all this, and much more of the like sort, is set forth at length herein. Much of it is written in so "top-lofty " a strain, that it would be comic, but for its manifold and intensified horrors ; and the rest is so vapid and spun out, that it would be tedious, but for its queer grammar and vulgar sentiment ;—indeed, for these we are sometimes, therefore, strange to say, almost thankful.
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